Word: patchwork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seemed easy in theory: getting a majority of Supreme Court Justices to sign a single opinion clarifying the rules for combatting discrimination. But from 1979 until the Johnson decision last week, that goal eluded a deeply divided high court, which had stitched together majorities through a patchwork quilt of separate opinions that raised as many questions as they answered. Which forms of affirmative action are legal? When are they mandatory? Are quotas ever permissible? Required? Even though the Supreme Court will continue to refine the boundaries of affirmative action through a case-by-case approach, the Johnson decision has helped...
...size of the disturbances hardly measured up to recent student unrest in Paris, Seoul, Madrid or Shanghai. Nonetheless, they were deeply troubling to a Kremlin regime that rules over a vast patchwork of nearly 100 nationalities, ranging from the European-minded Lithuanians to the Asian-oriented Kazakhs, who are of predominantly Muslim heritage. The Soviet Union is held together by a ramshackle, Russian-dominated central bureaucracy that is ever fearful that nationalist outbreaks could spread. Moscow was therefore quick to punish not only those who participated in the riots but the officials who failed to prevent them...
...Summons to Memphis lives up to its introduction and its author's renown. The story of grown children locked in polite, civil warfare with a tyrannical father is genuinely funny. And the setting offers a leisurely look at the geography that has emerged patchwork from Taylor's stories: the Upper South, which can be described as a swath of territory and customs running west from Richmond to St. Louis, with the emphasis on Tennessee. But Taylor has done more than obey all the rules he has imposed on himself, now and in the past. He satisfies surface expectations...
...circuitous path. "I may go into a town to write about a mean billy goat in someone's yard," he says, "and end up writing about an old goat at town hall." Such reflections come naturally to the Alabama-born Jaynes, who remains very much the Southerner. Yet his patchwork-quilt collection of pieces covers every section of the nation. Among the subjects that have piqued his interest are the loon preservationists in New Hampshire, a restaurant in Barrow, Alaska, that is the only place to find Mexican food in the Arctic Circle, and an entrepreneur in Des Moines...
Last fall, Eliot Hall's roof received patchwork repairs when leaks began dripping down into the rooms of fourth floor residents. Cabot House Superintendent Gene Ketelhohn said that while he will do all the repairs he can, "any cosmetic repairs" will have to wait until the renovations...